Twitter and Comcast partner up to let users change the channel with a Tweet

Twitter has partnered with Comcast and its NBCUniversal unit, that is bringing a feature which will allow television viewers to change the channel by tweeting.

November onwards Comcast will be releasing its new feature called ‘See It’ embedded in NBCUniversal tweets. When Xfinity users clicks on See It button, they’ll be able to tune into live programming either on their set-top box or on their mobile device.

“Each day, Twitter plays host to the real-time conversation about television and a large portion of that conversation occurs while a program is live on the air,” Twitter vice president Jana Messerschmidt said on the service’s blog. Twitter aims to making watching television with Twitter more interactive and fun.

Yahoo’s email redesign looks similar to Gmail’s interface

In its second makeover this year, Yahoo mail’s new design was unveiled this week. And it has striking similarities to Google’s Gmail. Many news forums are attributing this to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer being the common link between the two companies, who was working with Google previously.

The new design has a Gmail like tool that will compile together emails related to specific topics so they appear as a continuous string of messages. Yahoo mail users can now even customize their inbox with pictures and themes, Gmail users are already familiar with inbox themes.

However Yahoo is now offering a storage space of 1 TB, which is highly greater than the 15 GB offered by Gmail. Also, Yahoo’s email users can choose a picture as their backdrop,which will automatically appear on the mobile email applications that the company is modifying as part of the redesign.

Facebook makes a change to user privacy settings, removes option to be unsearchable by name

Facebook is toying with users’ privacy with its removal of users’ profile being unsearchable by only name. This means anyone can look up anyone’s timeline now without moderation.

Earlier Facebook asked its users ‘Who can look you up by name or contact info’ , for the people who had already made their timelines reachable for everyone by name search, this selection feature was removed for them. And now no one can control this privacy setting. Although there were other ways of finding people despite of what option they choose, this removal is still taking away a choice many people would want.

Facebook says only a limited people were actually using the setting anyway. This is a move to make its Graph Search even better, and to continue moving on its mission of connecting people worldwide.

Facebook announces redesign of its ad buying and reporting tools

In a separate news, Facebook has announced an update on its ad buying and reporting tools, making them more objective-based to make advertising on Facebook as simple as possible for the marketers.

Facebook till now decided upon the placement of ads on the websites, it will continue that trend but for the businesses who want a tailor-made ad positioning, it is now giving marketers an option to choose where their ad appears. They have also updated their Ads Manager tool — where advertisers measure the performance of their ads and campaigns — to map their results directly to the objective they chose when they created their ad.

The global roll out of this change will be completed in the coming few weeks.